By Mark Rix

Casio, in partnership with the 7DAYS puzzles page, launched “Casio Classwiz,” a four-week brand awareness campaign. Casio’s aim was to be present across the 7DAYS portfolio to harness the engagement power of the 7DAYS’ social media platform.

Casio kicked off the initiative by sponsoring brain teaser math puzzles, some of which could be solved with Casio calculators.

The eye-catching teasers and puzzles appeared in the 7DAYS’ newspaper on each of the 20 publishing days in September. Participants were challenged to solve the brain teaser, take a photo of their solution, and enter their responses solely through social media with the hashtag, #7DAYSClasswiz.

To attract more participants, one entrant per week was awarded an iPhone.

The results speak for themselves:

Cumulative print readership during the campaign reached 4.7 million.

1.6 million newspaper copies were sold.

On the social media side, the initiative resulted in the following successes on three social media platforms.

Twitter

There were 67 total campaign-related tweets from the hashtag #7DAYSUAE. Twitter impressions totaled 192,226 and engagement reached 13,265. There were a total of 2,743 Twitter-based entrants who tweeted their puzzle and teaser solutions using the hashtag #7DAYSClassWiz.

Facebook

The campaign consisted of 8 Facebook posts with a reach of 13,265, which resulted in 4,209 likes, comments, and shares. There were 13,265 entries via Facebook comments.

Instagram

The campaign consisted of 8 posts by 7DAYSUAE, which received 412 likes and 133 comments. In total, there were 1,490 entries via Instagram posts using #7DAYSClassWiz.

The number of entrants across all three platforms was 5,192 and competition page views totaled 5,859.

Casio was pleased with the results of this challenging end-user transformation strategy that changed newspaper readers into active social media users who initiated conversations with Casio.

Aboud Khederchah, assistant manager of marketing at Casio Middle East, commented on the success of the project:

“7DAYS demonstrated an extensive ability to understand our core strategy concept and came up with the right steps of implementation. The amount of creativity the 7DAYS team illustrated is immeasurable. We hit outstanding customer impressions and engagement numbers on social media. People got really creative and the amount of participation we got was tremendous.”

About Mark Rix

Mark Rix is chief executive officer at Catchpole Communications, publisher of 7DAYS, based in based in Dubai, UAE. He can be reached at mark.rix@7days.ae.